


Scream Down the Sky

by Megan



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Beating, Cameo appearances by the rest of the main cast, Choking, Crying, Dream Rape, Dream injuries, Emotional Trauma, Face Punching, Face Slapping, Hair bondage, Hair-pulling, Hopeful Ending, Implied Stalking, M/M, Manhandling, Non-Sexual Biting and Scratching, Nonconathon Treat, Rough Sex, Sadism, Tentacles, Victim Blaming, Victim Fights Back, sensory issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-12-02 19:33:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11515971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Megan/pseuds/Megan
Summary: Suddenly, terribly, Lalli knows what he's dealing with. And now he's outside of his own haven in that lawless, dangerous space between, and unlike the idiot he can't even hope to navigate that.It hadn't been a nightmare. Reynir had been trying to warn him.





	Scream Down the Sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Krubera](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Krubera/gifts).



When he slips back into camp right as light starts creeping into the sky, someone in the tank is screaming. It's the kind of screaming that gets into his head and crashes around, breaking his thoughts like glass until all he wants is for it to _stop_. 

The kind of scream someone makes when something is very, very wrong.

He throws open the hatch to see the idiot screaming and thrashing, tangled up in a blanket and coming perilously close to throwing off all four people holding him down. His face is wet and his braid has wrapped around his throat like some kind of massive, horrible snake.

"Get back outside, he's only having a nightmare," Tuuri says, and narrowly avoids a smack in the face when Reynir's arm slips out of her grip.

"I didn't find anything. I'm fine." Lalli doesn't close the hatch. Reynir is still screaming, Icelandic words that he doesn't understand. Tuuri blanches and Mikkel goes tree sap green in the face.

"Go," Emil says. The rest of the sentence is incomprehensible Swedish gibberish, but he does catch _clean_ and _later_.

He finally goes, if only because someone needs to make sure all the noise hasn't attracted a troll.

It doesn't attract a troll. By the time the sun rises, the screaming has stopped and everyone emerges from the tank except for Reynir.

When everyone else is eating breakfast and he's clean enough that Emil stops haranguing him, Lalli finally braves whatever is waiting for him in there and climbs back down into the tank.

What's waiting for him is a shaking pile of blankets-- Reynir sits curled up on a bunk, sobbing and hiccupping.

"Your nightmare had better not keep me awake," he mutters. It's not like Reynir can understand him to get more upset, and Tuuri isn't here to scold him.

Reynir peers out from under the blanket and says something incomprehensible and desperate. He sounds like Lalli is his only hope, and also like a raving madman. Mostly like that second thing.

"I don't know your weird language, stupid." Lalli flops down onto the floor without further comment. The sheets will only make him itch, but the cool space under the bunk sounds perfect.

Reynir doesn't stop talking. He follows Lalli onto the floor, scrambling off the bed and onto his hands and knees just so he can keep making stupid noises with his face.

Lalli throws an arm over his eyes and ignores him. He doesn't know how long he's there, but eventually he falls asleep despite the terrible Icelandic noise.

As soon as he wakes up in his haven, Lalli knows that there's something wrong. Something weird stalks around the edges, prodding at the border, and the feel of it twists at Lalli's gut.

He should stay as close to the center as possible. Shore up his defenses, make the edges of his haven as inhospitable as possible on the off chance the strange thing in the shadows can enter. He's heard this lecture a hundred times from Onni, and most of the time he would listen.

This time, though, he moves closer. The islands spring up sluggishly as he walks across the water, the ground under his feet muddy instead of solid. He frowns down at his feet and concentrates harder, but his haven still seems reluctant to listen to him. By the time he reaches the weird spot, he's in water up to his ankles.

Something brushes against his leg, and it's as if Lalli snaps out of a trance. What is he doing? He shouldn't be here, and even if he'd been stupid enough to investigate a disturbance just outside he should have turned around as soon as the ground refused to rise from the water for him. Now whatever lurks under the water has a chance to pull him under with it.

The pull doesn't come from the water. It comes from _outside his haven_. And it isn't a tentacle or a claw or some misshapen parody of a hand; it's a perfectly ordinary hand, closing around his arm and pulling him off balance.

Lalli crashes forward, the mud giving way under his feet, and he tumbles right out of his haven into somewhere else.

"You're much harder to get to than your friend," someone says, but it's too dark to see who he is. Lalli can feel, though, feel a long hand wrapped around his wrist so hard it grinds the bones together. He can feel a cold, oppressive, _nasty_ feeling on the back of his neck, like the owner of the hand is missing something vital.

Suddenly, terribly, Lalli knows what he's dealing with. And now he's outside of his own haven in that lawless, dangerous space between, and unlike the idiot he can't even hope to navigate that.

It hadn't been a nightmare. Reynir had been trying to warn him.

In the luckiest break Lalli has had in his entire life, everything fades when the kade begins to say something else.

When he opens his eyes, he's back in the tank. He's awake, and the next time he sleeps he'll be in his own haven. This time he won't do anything stupid, and he'll be fine.

Lalli doesn't think he'd screamed. No one looms over him or holds his arms down, no one's come running. As he rolls out from under the bunk and sits up, trying to get his breathing under control, the only thing he hears is a murmur of Icelandic.

Reynir is back on his bed, arms around his knees. His big, wet eyes all but glow in the dim light of the tank.

"I--" Lalli's own voice sounds too loud in the quiet, and he swallows hard before he continues in halting words that he hopes sound similar enough in Swedish and Icelandic. If only someone who speaks a useful language were the one constantly talking at him, instead of Emil and his Swedish. "I see the nightmare."

It's too real to be a nightmare, but he doesn't have another word for it that Reynir would come close to understanding.

"Kade," he says. There's no way he can explain this in broken, baby Swedish that Reynir probably doesn't even know. He needs Tuuri here to translate, except that he's not telling her what's happening here. "Bad mage. Evil."

Reynir makes a miserable, confused sound as he shakes his head. This is not going to work, not in the waking world where they can't understand each other. And how are they going to talk about it in a dream when the very thing they're discussing lurks in the shadows there?

Lalli goes outside without attempting further conversation, even though Reynir tugs at his sleeve to catch his attention on the way out.

"He didn't have a nightmare," Lalli says, finally resigned to the fact that he has to tell her something. "There's a kade out there; it tried to get me, too."

Tuuri grabs his wrist so hard it hurts.

"Lalli, did he--" _Shit, shit_ , she'd understood whatever Reynir had been shrieking in his sleep. He wrenches his arm free and takes a step back, bristling.

"I'm fine! Nothing weird happened," he lies. "I'm not some stupid Icelander. I can take care of myself."

"Mikkel thinks Reynir had some kind of flashback, that something bad happened to him before." Tuuri doesn't close the gap between them. Sometimes she gets that he needs space instead of crowding him, and he's thankful that this is one of those times. 

"Not before." Lalli shakes his head. He doesn't know what Reynir had been screaming, but if it's anything like what the kade had threatened Lalli with.... "In the dream. It must have seen him first; he runs around between dreams like an idiot. I'll be fine if I stay in my haven."

"You can ask Onni for help, too." Tuuri starts to reach out as if she's going to pat him on the arm, then draws back when he flinches.

No, he's not going to ask Onni for help with this. He doesn't need to arm Onni with yet another reason to banish him to his own haven, not when they might need his help later.

"Okay," he lies. He's lying to her a lot today. She narrows her eyes at him like she suspects exactly what he's on about, but doesn't press.

Everything is fine when he leaves. Lalli doesn't count Reynir jumping at every small noise to be a problem, so that doesn't take away from everything being fine. This part of the forest is quiet, no trolls or beasts or even birds around, but Lalli has half expected that since he'd realized what had been trying to enter his haven. The kade must kill off trolls and giants and anything else that threatens him, and the animals would avoid something that felt so wrong.

Lalli can feel it, a little. It's faint, but what he can feel is cold and foul. The feel of it on his skin is like the reek of mist on a bog. The kade is somewhere nearby, so near that his presence may not be Reynir's fault at all. He may have seen them in the waking world and made his own way to their dreams.

The skin-crawling feeling of wrongness is the only thing of concern, and he goes back to the tank with nothing new to report. Which means that there's no excuse to delay sleeping.

He closes his eyes to the sight of the bunk above him, and opens them to something that isn't his haven. His haven has never had a weird old temple in it. It sometimes has Reynir in it, but never Reynir trying to escape from something.

Lalli slips behind a tree without making a sound, peering through the branches as best he can without revealing himself.

"No, no, no, _no!_ " Reynir hangs onto the temple door by the tips of his fingers, trying to crawl inside to whatever sanctuary he thinks he'll find there. 

It doesn't work. The thing-- whether it's the kade he feels outside or a demon of old or some horrifying, unknown sort of monster that can work magic and hide itself behind a handsome face-- grabs Reynir by the braid and drags him screaming back over the threshold.

The same sort of screaming he'd done before, only this time Lalli can understand him.

His hands leave bloody trails where he still tries to grasp at the stones, nails and fingertips worn ragged. Except they aren't accidental, Lalli realizes. The blood is smeared into one of those needlessly complex Icelandic runes, and the design is almost finished--

"None of that, little witch," the kade-- there's no mistaking the chill crawling down the back of Lalli's neck, so that's what he must be-- says. He looks... normal. Handsome. His hair is straw-yellow and long and loose, and he's dressed like any of the mages in Keuuru might have. There's nothing about the way he looks that gives away what he is.

He plants his foot solidly on Reynir's hand. Reynir screams again, this time a raw, wordless sound ripped from his throat.

"Now," he murmurs, obscenely soft compared to the hysterical noises spilling from Reynir, "you're going to stop that and come back to _my_ dream. Both of you."

Lalli freezes where he stands. There's no way the kade knows he's here.

"I know you're there, mage," the kade singsongs. "You can't hide from me, not here."

He takes his foot off Reynir's hand and yanks him up by the braid. Reynir does seem to have some fight left in him, after all-- once he's on his feet, almost _off_ his feet with his toes barely scraping the ground-- he lashes out like a cornered animal. One of his hands connects with the kade's face, and when it does he rakes his torn fingernails right over it.

"You shouldn't have done that." The kade doesn't even flinch. Instead, he holds Reynir up by the front of his coat and wraps the rope of hair around his throat once, twice, three times. That leaves him plenty of length to use to pull it tight, strangling Reynir with his own braid.

Reynir gasps for air, hands too busy clawing at his hair and his throat to attack the kade. The toes of his boots make scuffling noises against the stones as he tries to find traction, noises that get into Lalli's head and stay there like they're scratching holes in his brain along with the leather.

The kade looks right at Lalli. His eyes are sickly green-white, the color of a corpse left to rot. Those ruin the illusion that he's an ordinary man, that he hasn't been consumed by his need to _take_.

"You know how things that happen here echo there," he says, and all Lalli can think of is how Reynir's hair had wrapped around his throat like an impossibly long snake while he'd screamed. "Come with me and I'll stop."

As annoying as Reynir is, Lalli does not actually want him to choke to death on his own hair. He steps out from behind the tree.

The kade unwraps Reynir's braid from around his throat slowly-- one loop, another, and another. When it finally hangs loose he keeps his grip on it, using it as a leash to drag Reynir stumbling and red-faced behind him.

"I'm sorry, I've been rude." He smiles, and if it weren't for his sickening eyes it would look nice. "I know who you are, Lalli Hotakainen, but I haven't introduced myself. My name is Sulo."

Lalli doesn't give a damn what his name is, not when he's taken hold of Lalli's arm with those same crushing, cold fingers that had pulled him right out of his haven.

He drags the both of them out of whatever this liminal space is, and the fall is even more disorienting without the water to blame it on this time.

The trees in this new dream are wrong, the vines somehow both too thick and too limp. The flowers are so wilted that they're halfway to rotted. Everything smells like a disused, decaying garden, like neglect, like death.

It looks familiar, though. He's been in this patch of forest before, scouting around the tank. It isn't far from where they're camped now, which means that he'd probably been right: Sulo had seen them in the waking world, whatever reasons he might have for living in the Silent World.

He wonders how many others like that are out there somewhere: immune, powerful enough to survive a fight with a troll, and too twisted for civilized people to abide their company. And down here, where no one is trying to reclaim the land now that the Danes have failed so miserably, is a good place to hide.

Reynir struggles against the vines tying him to the tree. Sulo has looped the braid around his bound hands and tied it in a loose knot, clearly fascinated by the idea of using Reynir's own hair against him.

There's a reason Lalli thinks that braid is so stupid.

"Don't be so impatient," he chides, not even looking up from where he's backed Lalli up against another tree. "I'm saving you for dessert."

Lalli does not like the implication that he's dinner.

"I need to thank the genius who designed these uniforms." He hooks a hand under one of Lalli's thighs and hikes his leg up, and he's deceptively strong enough that kicking him away doesn't work. Sulo acts as if Lalli hasn't tried moving at all, folding Lalli's leg up against his chest as easily as a child poses a doll. "I never get tired of the boots."

Lalli can't say anything, can't look away, can barely _move_. What kind of monster can control someone like this, even in his own dream?

"Stop it! You already have me, isn't that what you wanted?" How is Reynir managing to make so much noise? Doesn't he have that same crushing, cold weight holding him in place? Or can he slip past that as easily as he crashes other mages' haven walls?

And how does he not know that a kade never stops wanting, that nothing is ever enough? He can't be bargained down, can't be reasoned with.

Sulo's brow twitches. It's the first sign of weakness he's shown.

"If you're not going to be still, I'll have to find something else for you to do." He smiles.

As his smile widens, Reynir's screams get higher, louder, and less coherent. _No_ and _stop_ and _don't_ turn into nothing but bloodcurdling wailing.

Lalli almost appreciates that he can't look away.

"I've heard enough of that for now." Sulo strokes his free hand up Lalli's throat, light and ticklish and too much. "I do love to hear him beg for mercy, but I want to hear how you sound."

Reynir's screams are suddenly muffled, like there's something in his mouth.

_I do love to hear him beg._ He talks like he's heard this before. How long has he been terrorizing Reynir? 

"I saw what you did to the ghosts," Sulo murmurs, breathless and excited. "Such potential, such magnificence, and I'm going to wring it out of both of you until there's nothing left."

His fingers are long and thin; they feel like spiders on Lalli, crawling over his skin and making the hair on the back of his neck rise.

"You remind me of me of myself, when I was young and stupid and thought I could do anything." He stops touching Lalli's neck, which is good for a split second. Then it's worse, because he's ripping fabric with an efficiency that shouldn't be possible with one hand.

Lalli doesn't say anything. That's what Sulo wants, to provoke a reaction out of him. Instead he hisses his displeasure through clenched teeth and tries to ignore the nasty, tearing sound of his clothes coming off.

He needs to shut his eyes, cover his ears, curl up on the flat, hard floor and not be anything for awhile. He needs to wake up so he can find where this awful man hides nearby and shove a knife through his eyeball. Over and over again, until nobody could tell that his head had been a human skull once.

Sulo taps a finger up each one of Lalli's ribs like he's counting them, up one side and down the other. _Tap, tap, tap_. Each touch of his finger feels like a blow.

Lalli's boots are still on him, somehow. This much control over his dream, and he wastes it on undressing a man without taking his boots off?

"It doesn't have to be bad, you know." Sulo leans in close, his sickly, straw-colored hair falling in Lalli's face as he murmurs. "Maybe I'll see what works better, making you like it or hurting him."

Reynir lets out another muffled sob, then there's a slithery, wet noise.

"Or you can switch places. Once I see how much your friend can take, I'll make him beg to come while we see how many vines will fit inside you." The vines around his arms stir around his arms as if awakened by the kade's words.

The thought of enjoying this monster's attention is so disgusting that it gives Lalli the strength to spit in his fucking face.

Sulo laughs.

"I knew you'd like that idea." He wipes the spit off his cheek, then reaches up and rubs his fingers clean on Lalli's hair. "We might be here awhile. Your friend is good at this-- I wonder how many times you can come before he loses control and starts bleeding."

Lalli would spit on him again, but a palm covers his mouth before he can.

"I don't want to gag you, but I will if I have to." More vines wrap around his legs, drawing his knees up. The fingers on his ribs flatten into a palm on his belly, muscles jumping in an attempt to cringe away from the touch. "We'll both have more fun if you can talk."

There's an awful, wet noise from behind Sulo, then coughing and gagging. Reynir's breath catches in his throat, rasping and just this side of choking.

"Are you going to stop that awful screaming now?" Sulo sounds playful, sweet, even.

He steps back from Lalli to look at Reynir, and then Lalli has no choice but to see what's happening to the idiot.

He's still coughing, gasping for air and making half-drowned noises. The vines have him on his hands and knees, and his mess of hair hides most of his face. What Lalli can see is something the color and consistency of pine tar trickling from the corner of his mouth. It's in his hair, too, and on what remains of his clothes.

The vine tangling and smearing sap in his hair must have been in his mouth until a moment ago. That's what had been gagging him.

"Isn't that better?" Sulo kneels down in front of him. "Giving up doesn't have to be hard. Really, it's the easiest thing in the world."

He cups Reynir's chin in his hand, then presses a thumb into his mouth. Reynir shakes, knees buckling.

His torn coat hides most of it, but Lalli sees two vines snaking up his skinny, freckled thighs until they disappear under tattered brown fabric. They're both as thick as the vines around Lalli's arms, as wide as his wrist.

That's when he realizes why Reynir had started screaming, and only the invisible weight on his chest stops him from screaming himself.

Sulo makes a hissing noise and jerks his hand back from Reynir's face. A trickle of blood runs down from Reynir's mouth, and when Lalli realizes it isn't his he has to respect the idiot a little more. 

He slaps Reynir across the face hard enough to jerk his head to the side, hard enough to split his lip right open where it hits his teeth. The little bit of Sulo's blood is lost in the much larger spill of his own, and Reynir doesn't say anything-- just spits a mouthful of blood onto the ground.

If it had been Lalli, he would have spit the blood into Sulo's disgusting face, seen if he could hit him in the eye twice in a row.

The blow to the other side of Reynir's face is a punch to his jaw instead of an open-handed slap, and this time he spits out a tooth when he raises his head from it. It bounces off Sulo's knee, leaving a spot of blood behind, and suddenly the vines around his arms withdraw.

"Fucking Icelandic magic," Sulo mutters, seemingly more to himself than to Reynir, and walks around behind him. The rest of his tirade is too quiet for Lalli to understand as he yanks Reynir's arms behind him, pushes him facedown on the ground, and starts wrapping the braid around them. He bends Reynir into an arc, head forced back as he knots the rope of hair.

The vines bend his legs back until he's less an arc and more a circle, and Sulo binds his ankles to his wrists. By the time he's done, Reynir looks more concerned with breathing than struggling; his face is red and his chest heaves. The vines that had abandoned his arms both push into his mouth while he gasps.

"Maybe that will keep him occupied long enough for us to enjoy ourselves." Sulo is at Lalli's ear again, talking in that sickly, sticky voice that makes Lalli's skin crawl more than anything else here. He would almost rather have those spider fingers on him again than listen to that voice.

He regrets that thought a moment later, because then Sulo's hands _are_ on him, cold and bony and impossible to ignore as he tilts Lalli's chin up and looks him in the eyes again. 

This time, his tongue feels too heavy to spit. He can't do anything but look into those awful, corpse-green eyes and listen to his own blood pounding in his ears.

His legs are still pinned up by the vines, so there's nothing stopping Sulo from putting a hand on his thigh. The other hand is still on Lalli's face, forcing his head up.

It hurts. It hurts so much that Lalli wants to scream, to shriek at the top of his lungs until the force of it brings this entire dream down around him. He can't breathe, he can't think. Sulo forcing his way in is all he can feel and those terrible eyes are all he can see and that voice is all he can hear.

"You've been very good," Sulo murmurs, as if Lalli has any choice in the matter. 

He can move again, just a little bit. Enough that he's trying to writhe away from the pain without consciously meaning to. All he can think of is getting away, his body not caring that between Sulo and the tree there's nowhere to go. If he could move that far he would claw his own skin off to get away from this, claw his way out of his own body like it's a bear trap and biting off his own leg is the only way to escape.

"Yes, like that." He sounds happy that Lalli's putting up a little bit of a fight, and he digs his fingers into Lalli's hip and thrusts in hard enough to shake Lalli in his vine restraints.

He does scream then, loud and shrill as a signal whistle. It sounds like it's coming from someone else; Lalli hadn't realized he could scream like that.

" _Wonderful_." His terrible voice is even worse when it's breathy like that, because it sounds even less dangerous. "I knew you would scream like that as soon as I heard you. Scream for me like you sing to Kuutar, Lalli Hotakainen. _Scream._ "

Lalli screams, because standing still and staying silent would be worse. He shrieks himself hoarse, wordless and harsh. His voice frays, his throat feels raw and ripped-open, and still it doesn't stop.

Until it does, because he doesn't have enough breath to scream anymore.

Everything goes white around the edges, and not just because of how much he hurts. The air smells heavy, pungent, like it should burn his lungs-- like when Emil throws a phosphorous grenade. Whatever is tearing down the walls of Sulo's haven is every bit as destructive as one of those tiny bombs that can bring down half a crumbling old building.

Lalli wonders, desperately, if he's managed to invoke something or someone with his desperate screaming.

Sulo stays where he is, hands wrapped around Lalli's throat, and he squeezes so hard that Lalli loses his ability to breathe all at once. Lalli can't fight back, can't do anything but scream inside his own head as his vision wavers from lack of air and the landscape around them crumbles into foul-smelling dust.

He's still inside Lalli, and that sharp brand of pain is the only thing keeping him from slipping into unconsciousness.

"Fucking Freyja-worshipping son of a--" Sulo hisses insults from between his teeth, and that's when Lalli realizes he hasn't done anything at all. _Reynir has._ Reynir has slipped his bindings without strangling himself in his own hair, used some kind of terrible rune, done what Lalli can't, and...

...and he wakes up gasping for air, not quite retching. His arms are wrapped tight around his knees, so tightly that they're what's keeping him from taking as deep a breath as he would like.

The floor is solid under him. When he reaches a hand up, it hits the bottom of his bunk. Mikkel and Sigrun are talking outside, and someone-- Reynir, it's Reynir, and Lalli wishes he couldn't identify that noise-- is choking on air and wheezing like the breath has been knocked out of him.

Lalli manages to let go of his knees, breathe, and roll out from under the bunk. He's just barely on his knees when Reynir sits bolt upright, hair wild around his face, and sprints for the door without so much as acknowledging Lalli.

No one else is inside, and when Lalli braves whatever waits outside the tank he finds an insultingly normal afternoon. Everyone except Reynir and Mikkel stands gathered around the fire, and he spots the bright flash of Reynir's hair over in some bushes. He's doubled over and heaving, and Mikkel is already headed his way.

Tuuri, Sigrun, and Emil go silent when he approaches, as if he could understand what they're saying.

"He's nearby," he says to Tuuri. She'll know who he means. "I can show you where."

After that, there's a conversation he doesn't understand. Tuuri is making her face that means something awful has happened and she doesn't want to talk about it, Sigrun is yelling so loudly that he pulls his hood down over his ears in a futile attempt to hide, and Emil is just making a stupid open-mouthed face like he's a fish. Mikkel is still off with Reynir, even though the disgusting retching noises have stopped.

Lalli catches his own name and then Reynir's, but not much else.

"Tell him to draw the rune that smells like Emil's bombs," Lalli says when Mikkel returns with Reynir in tow. Reynir still looks green around the edges. "It helped, in the dream."

Tuuri relays this. He knows she does, because Reynir brightens up so pathetically-- probably because he's just been told he's helpful-- that Lalli is annoyed with him all over again. Then she translates for the others; Lalli knows she does because Emil gets that "I am in love with my flamethrower" expression and looks at Reynir with stars in his eyes. It figures that horrible, messy explosions are what make Emil believe in what's right in front of his dumb Swedish face.

"Sigrun wants to know if you're sure you can find him." Tuuri doesn't sound like she's making a weird joke, so she doesn't like this plan.

"Yes." Lalli looks over her shoulder, catches Sigrun's eye, and nods. He gets a short, sharp nod in return. Sigrun looks like _she_ likes this plan just fine.

"Mikkel thinks we're crazy, so he's going to stay back at the tank. But I think Emil is coming around; he's going to help." Tuuri reaches out and puts a hand on his shoulder, and this time he doesn't flinch or shake her off. She lowers her voice, even though no one else in the group can understand them. "Lalli, I know you don't want to talk about it, but you should. With Reynir, at least."

"Talking is pointless, Reynir is stupid and his hair almost got him killed, and I'll be fine once we kill the mage." Lalli has too much to do to worry about talking to anyone. He needs to check his rifle, sharpen his knife, and make sure he's got one of those bomb runes.

He does look over at where Reynir is already spreading papers out on the ground and opening a bottle of ink. Reynir looks up at just the right time to see, and he meets Lalli's gaze before he can pretend he hasn't been looking. He looks like... something Lalli can't think of a comparison for, honestly. Sad and scared, but also like someone's lit a fire in him.

Maybe once this is all over, they can talk about it. Just them-- it's not like Tuuri would understand, even if she'll know the words. But not until this is over and Lalli can breathe without foul magic weighing him down a little more with every rise and fall of his chest. The air is worse today, colder and wetter and heavier with the reek of a man without a soul.

He nods at Reynir. Reynir nods in return, then goes back to his runes. They both have a job to do now.

**Author's Note:**

> All the words that Lalli thinks might be close enough in Swedish and Icelandic were picked via comparing results in Google Translate, so results are not guaranteed. Which might not be a bad thing, since Lalli would almost certainly get things wrong.


End file.
